25 July 2009 6:17 PM

Why is it so hard for us to see what is right in front of our noses? Last week, the one-time Trotskyist and perpetual student Alan Milburn (he still hasn’t finished his PhD), in a ‘commission’ set up by Gordon Brown (a student hard Leftist himself), launched an apparently bone-headed assault on the professions and the great universities.

Can Mr Milburn really be as stupid as he sounds? Or is there another motive here? What sort of Government is this really?

Just days ago we learned that the latest Defence Secretary, in his 30s, attended an unknown number of meetings of the secretive, pro-IRA International Marxist Group, an episode he flatly refuses to discuss further.

Given that this Government did in fact grant ‘Victory to the IRA’, as the IMG demanded, it seems relevant to me. One of his forerunners, the menacing ‘Doctor’ John Reid, was an adult member of the pro-Soviet Communist Party.

The most powerful Minister in the Government is Peter Mandelson, once a member of the Young Communist League. Tony Benn, who ought to know, maintains that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, was also an active Trotskyist and levels a similar allegation against Stephen Byers, once a prominent member of the Blairite inner circle.

None of these people has ever been frank about his Marxist past or apologised for it or explained it. Almost all of them would have kept it secret if they could (just as Anthony Blair dishonestly denied his membership of that KGB tool, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).

None of them, in my view, has given up the radicalism of the past. They have simply discovered that they can use Parliament to achieve a revolution they once thought would need barricades and red flags. And these, I stress, are only the ones we know about.

Who knows how many others – MPs, Ministers, civil servants, judges, BBC executives, even Bishops – still treasure revolutionary aims? Now, there is one other recorded instance of a Marxist government coming to power legally in an advanced, law-governed parliamentary democracy with a strong middle class and independent professions. That is Czechoslovakia in 1948.

The parallels are not, of course, exact. The Czech communists had Russian tanks behind them and could move much faster and much more ruthlessly. But they concentrated their attacks on the police, the armed forces and the professions. And they sought to drive the middle classes out of higher education, by deliberate discrimination against those whose parents were professionals themselves. They also destroyed the savings of the middle class, attacked religion and the married family, used the schools for relentless propaganda and rapidly dismantled the constitutional protections against absolute power.

Remind you of anywhere?

I said back in 1997 that New Labour was engaged in a slow-motion coup d’etat. Speed up the past 12 years (like that wonderful old film London To Brighton In Four Minutes) and you could easily see it for what it is.

But most of the media classes still moronically describe New Labour as ‘Right-wing’. Marxists have a term for them as well. It is ‘Useful Idiots’.

Coco would approve of vanishing cigarettes

The beauteous Audrey Tautou has had her cigarette censored and replaced with a pen in publicity posters for her new film about the fashion designer Coco Chanel. Good.

Miss Chanel was a very intelligent person. If she were alive now, she would not be fool enough to risk her health by smoking. The same goes for Franklin Roosevelt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and a lot of other people who have had cigars and cigarettes removed from their portraits by the anti-smoking police.

I doubt, myself, if a picture of FDR or Brunel smoking would influence anybody. But I am certain that Audrey Tautou can. I think it’s time even for the most libertarian to recognise that the anti-smoking campaign is working, and does a lot of good.

A defeatist church worshipping the trivial

The Church of England never sleeps in its efforts to chuck away its own heritage and abandon the principles of Christianity. Plans for a joint ceremony of marriage and baptism beautifully sum up its defeatist view of life and religion.

So far as I know, nobody ever assumed that men and women came to the altar as pure virgins. Nor did the rules demand a confession of past wrongdoing – and a good thing too.

In fact, the proper, beautiful, earthy and tough Prayer Book marriage service (which the CofE is trying to stamp out) actually includes a pledge by both parties to ‘forsake all other’.

It’s perfectly reasonable to use the old service for anyone who wants to start again on a new and different footing. But it’s wrong to pretend that Christianity thinks it is a good idea to have children outside wedlock, because it doesn’t, and anyway it isn’t.

By the way, don’t you love the way these people cling to what they think is Ye Olde Tradition in stupid, trivial matters, while abandoning it in important ones. The unfortunate victims of this new service are handed lighted candles towards the end of the banal, illiterate ceremony.

Why not give them good quality electric torches instead? In the coming days when windmills provide our electrical power, such a gift would at least be useful.

What a great idea it wasn’t to invite IRA murderer Patrick Magee to a 25th anniversary commemoration of the Brighton Bomb. Such a pity we couldn’t have asked Hermann Goering to a commemoration of the London Blitz as well. I’m sure we could have found some drivelling, grief-counselled idiots to make friends with the Reichsmarschall who organised the deaths of their relatives. One thing you have to admit about capital punishment, it spares the organisers of such ceremonies from having to face these awkward social dilemmas, such as ‘can we put the Tebbits next to the man who wrecked their lives?’

*******************************************************************************************************************The last remaining hereditary peers seem to be doomed. The Tory Party, too greedy for office to have any principles, don’t understand that this is a bad thing. Once the peers are gone, the Throne will be next and what principle will they be able to call on to defend that, having sold this pass? And doesn’t Mr Cameron think inheritance is important, not least when it concerns the property and money he hopes to inherit? Bet he does. Quite right too. Without the right of inheritance, there’s no private property. Without private property, there’s no liberty. That’s why socialist revolutionaries hate the hereditaries.

Is election such a guarantee of quality? Recent events in the Commons don’t seem to suggest so. As for appointed peers, do we really prefer the foul-mouthed Alan Sugar to some decrepit, diffident 19th Earl of somewhere, smelling faintly of old dog, with a crumbling country house and a thousand years of duty and honour behind him?

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24 July 2009 8:25 AM

For the next two weeks this site will be operating its summer timetable - the Mail on Sunday column will continue to be posted each Sunday, and will be open for discussion. I may make the occasional rapid rebuttal, but there will be no major mid-week postings.

A few general comments. One, I noticed that as soon as made it even clearer than it has always been to those who pay attention that I am in favour of legal restrictions on alcohol and tobacco, the proponents of the ‘what about alcohol and tobacco, then, eh? Eh?’ line of attack vanished without trace. Indeed, I was promptly accused of robbing the working class of its pleasures and of proposing (as I do not ) a total legal ban on alcohol. So much for that specious rubbish.

All that remained was more drivel from people who ought to know better about the 'liberty' to destroy your brain. People who attempt to mutilate or otherwise destroy their own bodies are generally considered unhinged, and sectioned. Is this an interference with their 'liberty', or a benevolent intervention? People who destroy their brains (which are not visible, like the damage they do, but are still part of their bodies) are, by contrast, celebrated in our debased culture, at least until the damage is so great that they, too, have to be guided, gibbering and raving, into the locked ward. Wouldn't it have been better to have prevented them from embracing this irreversible fate in the first place, by a few exemplary sentences and a little well-aimed fear?

There is much quotation of John Stuart Mill on this subject, though Mill's plea for liberty was written in an age so different from ours that it is increasingly hard to believe it ever existed, one of pervasive morality which might be described as oppressive by many. But note that Mill also imagined the possibility of other times, and said that civilization: ‘can become so degenerate that neither its appointed priests or teachers, nor anybody else, has the capacity or the will to take the trouble to stand up for it’. That is pretty much where we are today.

Various unproveable claims were made that drug taking had enhanced the talents of various successful artists, musicians and businessmen. How can we know this? Since we have no idea what their work would have been like if they had not taken drugs, we cannot. Logic suggests that they would have done better if they had not fried their brains.

Meanwhile, none of the drug-lobby (even the ones who claim they have no personal interest in promoting the legalisation of filthy poison, who must therefore be either stupid or wicked) ever answers my point about the unknown number of young people who will be terribly damaged by drugs, especially the super-dangerous drug lyingly marketed as 'soft', cannabis. They might be saved from this tragedy by a strict and well-enforced law, counterbalancing the enormous peer-pressure to take drugs now present in our culture.

In the past week I have spoken to four people who have personal knowledge of teenagers who have become seriously and irreparably mentally disordered after smoking cannabis. This is, I suspect, a common problem in modern Britain. Can any responsible person really continue to act as if there is no connection? Those who do - because they help to maintain the culture which says we should be relaxed about cannabis - seem to me to have the moral status of the cigarette manufacturers who ignored the compelling evidence that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. That is to say, they should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

Now to this week's arguments. I'm asked how I square working for a Sabbath newspaper with my beliefs. Once again, people are mistaking sympathy for total identification. I don't, and didn't say I did, share the views of the Scottish Calvinists on the Sabbath, but I sympathise with their loss and don't see why, since they are heavily concentrated in their islands, that they should not be allowed to maintain their own rules there. I think there should be reasonable restrictions to protect the character of Sunday as a day of rest for as many people as possible. Sunday papers, of course, are actually produced on every day except Sunday. I only had to work on Sundays when I worked for a daily paper. And even in Victorian, strictly Sabbatarian Britain Sunday newspapers were distributed, just as trains ran and (I think) post was delivered, on Sundays. These aren't essential, in the way that hospitals and fire stations are, but they are justifiable.

On the picking and choosing question, the Bible is a library of laws, histories, commandments, prophecies, parables and poetry. Are we seriously supposed to treat the Song of Songs in the same way that we treat St Matthew's Gospel? Or the Books of Kings as we treat the Book of Job (no such person ever existed)? Then there's the Apocrypha. The story of Susannah and the Elders is the world's first detective story, a feminist parable and a warning against dirty old men in official positions, and has been rather beautifully painted by Christian artists. Yet there is disagreement about whether it even belongs in the Bible at all, and the same goes for the beautiful passage from the Wisdom of Solomon (‘The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God’) and Ecclesiasticus: ‘Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us’, plus the lovely Tobit passage enjoining charity: ‘Give alms of thy goods, and never turn thy face from any poor man; and then the face of the Lord shall not be turned away from thee’. This raises the question of how man-made the Bible is. It is not a Christian version of the Koran. It does not oblige me to slay any Amalekite I happen to see. On the question of slavery, the Children of Israel are repeatedly enjoined to remember that they were themselves slaves in Egypt, which if taken seriously amounts at the very least to an injunction to treat slaves with kindness and generosity, and could be interpreted as a condemnation of slavery in general. The anti-slavery movement certainly originated among Christians, and Islam has been notably backward in abolishing this nasty institution. But on what basis, apart from that of Christian love, can we conclude that slavery is evil? We have to pick and choose. The question is, how to do so. For this I think we need to rely on scholarship, reason and tradition.

I am amused, and unsurprised, to find out about Mr Embery's affiliation. The Fire Brigades Union is perhaps the most politically correct union in the country. This bears out a theory of mine, the FBU having in the forgotten past been one of those most penetrated by far-left sympathisers. It has also let its members down quite badly, leading them into silly strikes (the first major story I covered as a Labour reporter was the FBU's 1970s strike, during which Labour ministers strove in vain to persuade the union leaders that they had won a huge victory, which they had. Recently they had another daft and counterproductive walk-out). And it has rolled over and accepted the ridiculous PC sex quotas imposed on it by ultra-feminist fanatics in government. I think Mr Short is pretty accurate in his characterisation of matters. And I shall imagine Mr Embery in his FBU hat when he next writes a fulminating denunciation of God Almighty. I have been having some fun googling him. Perhaps he should fit a smoke alarm to his keyboard (NB: Health and Safety announcement. This is an attempted JOKE. Please do not take it seriously. Contents may be flippant.)

I'm asked to come up with some peaceful and bloodless liberation struggles. Here are a few: Polish Solidarity, which drove the USSR from Poland without harming a hair of anyone's head (I agree the Polish state was responsible for several deaths in Gdansk, and the murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko. But Solidarity did not respond in kind, and still won. Likewise Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, and the Civic Forum, and the Protestant Pastors who organised the East German resistance (though by and large it was a genuine popular movement requiring little organisation).

Two people, perhaps three, were killed in the overthrow of Soviet Communism, which had established itself in power through millions of deaths. And they died by accident. The ideas - of Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mstislav Rostropovich - achieved liberation without violence.

If Jeff Pollitt knows it annoys me to call me ‘Peter’ why does he do it? He really can't blame the fact that he went to a Secondary Modern.

Mike Barnes writes: ‘You seem to get the hump with certain people who write on your comments page. This week a Mr Mulholland last week some other, and mostly over the smallest error in syntax or facts that might take researchers hours to uncover.’ I don't think Mr Mulholland's problems can be described as 'syntax', nor were they to do with obscure facts. Quite the contrary. And I don't think this applies to the other criticisms I have made of various posters either. Mr Barnes should read more carefully before he condemns.

Of course students and young people are keen to work on Sundays. They don't have wives and children.

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21 July 2009 9:39 AM

Depending on who you are, this week's headline is either wholly gripping or completely off-putting. I suspect quite a lot of my readers would also at least try to discover a connection between all four. Maybe there is one. But at the moment the only link I can see is that I'm writing about them all at once. I should also mention that I've posted a response on the 'Defence Secretary' thread to 'Mike' who seems to think he has scored heavily by saying that I, too, was once a Trotskyist. No, 'Mike', you have just shown that you entirely missed the point.

Some people have come to the defence of ‘Doctor’ Reid - who by the way didn't respond to my attempts (phone and e-mail) to get in touch with him about this last week. I can't really work out why anyone should help him here. Apart from the fact that he seems well able to look after himself (do a Google search for ‘John Reid’, ‘witnesses’ and ‘Elizabeth Filkin’), he's denying doing something that he did actually do. Here's his complaint, which I mocked: ’I never at any stage expressed the hope, expectation, promise or pledge that we would leave Afghanistan without firing a shot.’

And here, once more, is what he actually said in Afghanistan: ’We’re in the south to help and protect the Afghan people to reconstruct their economy and democracy. We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years’ time without firing one shot.’

No, it's not a promise or a pledge. I didn't say it was. But it is certainly a hope, and might well be an expectation. He said it wasn't. What he was actually doing at the Kabul press conference was contrasting the supposedly constructive nature of the British mission with the utterly different action of the US forces then. Do any of ‘Doctor’ Reid's defenders think he knew at the time that this deployment was going to be bloodier than Iraq, or that if he had realised this, he would have given such a hostage to fortune? Oh, come on. He didn't know what he was starting, which is the whole point, and why those words have stuck to him like chewing gum to the sole of a shoe.

Anyway, his embarrassment over this quote (which I spent some hours of last week tracking down to ensure that I had it right) is pretty minor compared with being dead or badly injured. That's why I thought (and still think) he might be well-advised to stay silent when coffins are coming home in such numbers. It's a minor burden to have to bear. You'd also have thought that a man who was for some years an active member of the Communist Party, in the days when it supported (and was supported by) the USSR, might have noticed that Afghanistan was a death-trap for those who invaded it, notably the Russians in 1979.

Adam Preston says ‘There is a clear distinction between his words as cited in Channel 4 news and the meaning which you attribute to them.’ Well, no there isn't, for actually I attributed no meaning to them. It was ‘Doctor’ Reid who insisted that they did not mean something which they quite clearly did. ‘Doctor’ Reid said he had ‘never’ (no wiggle-room there) expressed four things, two which might be called offers of a particular result, two which might be called expectations of a particular result.

Then there's our amazing new contributor, Mr Mulholland, author of this classic posting: ’OH NO! Members of the Labour Party MAY HAVE BEEN SOCIALISTS! Stop the presses!’

Now, I am starting to worry about Mr Mulholland. Last week, too, he defended Bob Ainsworth, in these terms: ’You also refer to the IRA as 'terrorists' which I find madly contemptible. The IRA are fighting for the freedom of a nation from being ruled by a crown that they do not want after having their country swamped by Protestant sympathisers to such a cause. I am a supporter of non-violent resistance myself but their cause was and remains a worthy one. You also belittle Bob Ainsworth. This man, though he has lost a little respect by deferring to the doomed New Labour neoliberal con, is still a highly respected trade union leader here in Coventry and reputable MP. Referring to the department as the 'Ministry of Defeat' is insulting to a British soldier who is ready and willing to lay his life down for us.’

A little later, after being pretty thoroughly corrected on the IRA by other contributors, Mr Mulholland returned to say: ‘Upon further research I take back my comments about the IRA. I profoundly apologize for those remarks and hope that you will forgive me. Thanks. I was not aware of the sort of things they were up to and to what extent.’

How very odd. Mr Mulholland appears to hail from Coventry, a city where I briefly lived and worked in the mid-1970s. At that time it was still widely remembered in Coventry that there had once been a particularly nasty IRA bomb let off in there in Broadgate (on August 25th 1939). Five people were killed and more than 50 injured. The popularly accepted account was that the bomb had sent a large piece of plate glass flying down the street, which had cut several people in two. The 'Chief of Staff' of the IRA at the time was a certain Sean Russell, who died in May 1940 aboard a German U-Boat, while on his way home to do some more evil deeds. He had gone to the Third Reich after the outbreak of World War Two, to offer his services to Hitler. Sinn Fein still revere him, and there is a monument to him in Dublin which has been the focus of some controversy.

I had initially agreed with a number of correspondents who praised Mr Mulholland for his apology. However, when I looked back over his contributions I was puzzled. While such a profound ignorance of the real nature of the IRA might conceivably be possible among some of the dimmer Irish Republican supporters in the USA, it is very hard to see how a sentient adult in Britain, and especially in Coventry, could know so little of this organisation. Even if a Coventry person wasn't aware of the famous 1939 atrocity, how could (say) the Warrington murder of Johnathan Ball (three years old) and Tim Parry (12 years old) in 1993 have passed him by? Or come to that the Birmingham pub bombings? Leave aside the wrongful convictions of the alleged culprits, important but not relevant to this point, 21 wholly innocent people were blown to shreds in a few seconds one night in November 1974, by the IRA. I might add that most decent people would condemn the attempt to massacre the democratically-elected government of the country in Brighton, incidentally slaughtering or maiming lots of other people who happened to be nearby when the bomb went off. All these things were in the papers, on TV and on the radio, quite a lot. Birmingham is just round the corner from Coventry. A lot of rubbish is talked now by New Labour types about how the IRA 'always gave warnings'. Well, they sometimes did, and often didn't - but the warnings were generally pretty useless even where they were given, and are no kind of excuse for what they did. They were filthy murderers and we should never forget it.

Likewise, can he possibly be unaware of the real point I am making about the revolutionary pasts of many of the 'New Labour' elite? This is that these people are not, as idiotically claimed by much of the media, a 'right-wing' revolution against a 'left-wing' old-style Labour. They are practical men and women of the New Left, uninterested in nationalising the railways, gripped by sexual, social and cultural revolution and hostile to national sovereignty. They grasp that their revolutionary objectives can after all be achieved by Parliamentary means, not least because most in the media are either sympathetic to them, or so dim and uninstructed in the ways of Marxism that they cannot see what is going on in front of their noses.

On abortion, yes of course there is a difference between abortion and the suicide of Sir Edward and Lady Downes. However, there will be a good deal less difference between abortion and what we are likely to get if hard cases of this kind are used to make bad law.

If 'assisted suicide' becomes legal, I am quite sure there will be cases where the 'assistance' includes subtle pressure. What's more, if 'assisted suicide' is legal, it will be very hard to resist provisions of euthanasia of some kind, not very long afterwards.

I suspect, and I imagine many others will confirm, that quite a lot of old, ill people now in hospital are being quietly hurried towards death, by a failure to ensure that they eat and drink enough, and by excessive doses of morphine. This is an ugly, complicated subject. But it should be discussed as such, rather than diverted into a debate on heartbreaking stories of individuals facing a decline into total paralysis or blindness or whatever it is.

I made the parallel with abortion for two reasons. One to demonstrate how a society which looks down on the Nazis, the eugenicists, the sterilisers and the killers of the mentally handicapped in the 1930s, now permits the mass killing of healthy babies, and also the killing in the womb of the supposedly handicapped, on the grounds that they are handicapped - though we would never accept this with babies outside the womb. The refusal of many people to acknowledge to themselves that this is going on was illustrated by the correspondents who seem genuinely to believe that most abortions are a response to rapes or other terrible crises, when in fact they are just a (very nasty) form of late contraception, and also an acceptable (to nice, liberal us) form of the Nazi eugenics programme.

This is the other reason I suggested a parallel. Abortion was legalised because hard cases were (as they are in assisted suicide) used to make bad law. The reformed law was then used for purposes which surprised and shocked many of those who had supported the reforms, influenced by fears of backstreet abortion butchery. Their response, in most cases, was to pretend to themselves that what was happening wasn't happening, and to get cross with those who pointed out that it was. This is why almost the only obscenity which cannot be broadcast on British TV is an accurate account of what an abortion actually looks like. The violent destruction of a recognisably human form, which is living at the beginning of the procedure, and dead and dismembered at the end of it is too obviously what it is.

They were right to be shocked, but wrong to be surprised. This is what happens when you blur the boundaries. The same sort of deception is bound to take place when the mass disposal of the old gets under way.

If you're a Roman Catholic (or, I believe, a Lutheran) the Fourth Commandment is the Third Commandment. Let's not get into the old graven images argument just now. It's the one about keeping the Sabbath Day holy.

Those who claim that man invented God, rather than the other way round, seem to me to have a grave difficulty with the Ten Commandments. Almost all of them are downright inconvenient to an energetic, self-confident man. Nobody would have made them up to suit himself. Several require a great deal of imagination and forethought, not to mention experience, before you can see the point of them at all. Some of them are just irritating commands from on high, demanding total obedience, respect and no messing around with other gods, thank you very much.

But the one about the Sabbath Day is perhaps the most interesting. It's not like the others at all. If you visit West Jerusalem on a Saturday, you can still see it being taken very seriously indeed. I think it was the (Jewish) comedian Jackie Mason who said: ‘You never get anyone saying “Don't go into that neighbourhood. It's dangerous. There are a lot of Jews living down there.” ‘

But in Jerusalem on Saturday that's not quite true. Head down certain very Orthodox streets in a car, and you may get a rock thrown at you by a bloke in a beard, sidelocks and a big hat - for Sabbath-breaking.

Even in the big hotels, there will always be one lift that goes slowly up and down, stopping at every floor, so that the devout don't have to perform the 'work' involved in pressing a lift button. Buses and trains don't run. An extraordinary and rather enjoyable quiet descends (much the same thing happens in Muslim countries on Friday).

This tends to bring to my mind the saying of Christ that ‘the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.’ (Mark 2, xxvii). And yet I think that an ordained, unbreakable day of rest, observed by all at once, is essential for the health and happiness of any society. If there is no day when the whole family can be sure of being and eating together, then the family will be weakened. If workers are not protected by a stern law from being forced to work on that rest day, then they will be forced to work, and many poor people will have no family life.

And if the idea of a Sabbath is not generally respected, then the practical fact of the day of rest will quickly depart.

Revolutionaries have always understood how subversive it is to get rid of Sunday. The French Jacobins (weirdly obsessed with measuring everything in accordance with the number of toes on two feet, in time as well as distance and mass) tried to introduce a ten-day week, of ten-hour days (though they bizarrely stuck with twelve renamed and re-ordered months, the one time they admitted that duodecimal systems might have a point to them). This experiment collapsed because workers quickly realised they were being robbed of a lot of time off, 36 days off a year instead of 52, and because plans to manufacture decimal/metric clocks came to nothing. And not long after that, the revolution began to behead its own chiefs, and a sort of sanity returned.

The Russian Bolsheviks were cleverer, They tried first of all a six-day week, then a five-day one, with everyone having different days off, in an attempt to destroy the married family. But this was so unpopular that it was eventually dropped. Easy divorce, the fixing of wages and prices so that both parents were forced to work outside the home, the end of the stigma against illegitimacy (and abortion on demand) achieved the same ends.

It took modern, Christian, Tory Britain to destroy the Sabbath and make the measure popular. The Sunday Trading laws, one of Margaret Thatcher's proudest deeds, have wiped out what remained of the British Sunday. Millions of shop staff are now forced to go to work (and they are forced, because do you think they'd stay in the job long if they didn't agree to work Sundays?). And its transformation into the principal shopping day of the week has swept away all traces of what it used to be like.

I'm not saying it was perfect. I think our old Sundays were too gloomy and too restricted. Some people always had to work on Sundays, to keep the place going. But to chuck the thing away altogether was both silly and wrong. I think the sum of human unhappiness has been greatly increased. (But confusingly, the sum of human pleasure, a very different thing from happiness, and often used as a substitute for it, has possibly been increased).

So I'd like to put in a word for the dogged and principled Free Churchmen (and women) who protested last weekend against the introduction of a Sunday ferry between the Isle of Lewis and the Scottish mainland. Many of the protestors were in tears, as you might well be if centuries of beloved tradition were being wiped out before your eyes, and most people were laughing at you.

They went down fighting, though, and I admire them very much for standing for what they believe in. Donald Martin of the Lord's Day Observance Society and Stornoway's Free Church (Continuing) brushed aside questions about whether he had a democratic mandate for opposing the change, using words that Oliver Cromwell (and my grandfather) would have found easily understandable. He was appealing to a higher authority. ‘I'm speaking from the Bible,’ he said. ‘In the Commandments, God gave man ten laws, and if we agree that we shouldn't be killing or stealing, then we should also be keeping the Sabbath: it's not for us to pick and choose. I would challenge anybody to find a place elsewhere in the UK, where God's law has been jettisoned, which has changed for the better. And I think more and more people on the mainland are looking at Lewis and thinking, 'you guys have a point': people are tired of 24/7, of constantly being ruled by emails and Blackberries - they want a day off.’

He dismissed the ferry company's argument, which uses such concepts as equality and human rights. ‘The Fourth Commandment exists for the good of man, and according to God's word, Jesus Christ is the Lord of us all, whether we like it or not. However, concerning the ferry, it appears that people have decided by one means or another; they've done what's right in their own eyes - but it will bring more anarchy, more societal break-up and putrefaction, if we lose that foundation of God's word.’

In the BBC coverage of this, the 'balanced' report offered the prospect of 'economic growth' as a counter to the objections of the Sabbath supporters. But it isn't. It ignores what they say completely. A bigger economy is no cure for a soulless, heartless, frantic world of bleeping cash registers and ever-busy car parks. On the contrary, it just makes it more soulless, on a bigger scale. It would be good if, at the very least, materialists would acknowledge that there is an argument here they need to meet, and try to answer on its own terms.

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19 July 2009 8:52 AM

In a number of newspaper stories last week, it was suggested that the latest Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, had been - at the age of 30 - a 'candidate member' of a body called the 'International Marxist Group'. The IMG, originally associated with the prominent student revolutionary Tariq Ali, was a Trotskyist group active in the 1970s and 1980s, whose members at one stage adopted the slogan "Victory to the IRA".

Why does this matter?

It is my belief that many prominent Labour MPs were directly or indirectly connected with this or similar revolutionary groups in the 1960s and 1970s, and this is a significant current in New Labour. Those involved tend to prefer to keep quiet about it. In my view this is because it still matters, and still gives an important clue about the general opinions they hold, despite the bland image of 'new Labour' as a 'right-wing' tendency, because it no longer wishes to nationalise the railways.

The full extent of this will probably never be known. These groups were very secretive, and relevant MI5 files have almost certainly been destroyed; it is very hard to establish the facts without first-hand information. Recently the former Home Office minister Tony McNulty revealed that he had been a revolutionary, mainly in the hope of currying favour with a largely left-wing audience. I happened to find out about this, because I was at the same gathering, but I do not think Mr McNulty can have expected - or intended - this to happen.

It has been claimed by prominent left-wingers that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, once belonged to the IMG, though sources in the Treasury have denied this to me. Two senior ministers in the original Blair Cabinet were widely believed to have been revolutionaries. John Reid was without doubt an adult member of the Communist Party. Peter Mandelson was a Young Communist.

When I sought more information about Mr Ainsworth's alleged links with the IMG, I talked to a 'spokesperson' who, after an unsatisfactory phone conversation, sent me a written statement. This is what it said: "Bob Ainsworth has never been a member of the International MarxistGroup. In the early 80s he attended a couple of their meetings, at the request of a colleague, which reinforced his firm view that he did not agree with anything they had to say."

On Friday afternoon, shortly before 4.00 pm, I e-mailed this spokesperson (and alerted the spokesperson by text message that the e-mail had been sent). I have had no response of any kind since then.

This is what my e-mail contained:

"I would like to ask the following supplementary questions:

1. It was never alleged that Mr Ainsworth was a member of the International Marxist Group (IMG). The allegation made in some newspapers and in the Wikipedia entry was that he was a 'candidate member', that is to say someone who was being considered for membership. Does he confirm or deny that this was the case?

2. It was alleged that he was in this position during two years, 1982 and 1983. This suggests that his connection with the IMG extended to more than "a couple of meetings". How many meetings did he in fact attend? "A couple" is generally taken to mean "two". Does it mean two in this case, or more? If so, roughly how many and how often?

3. Did he participate actively in those meetings, engaging in debate at them?

4.Did he subscribe to any of the publications of the IMG?

5. Did he sell IMG publications to colleagues or in public places, or distribute IMG material of any kind?

6. If he already took the view that he did not agree with anything the IMG said, as implied by the use of the expression "confirmed his view", why did he then attend any of their meetings?

7. Given that much of what the IMG 'said' was the standard expression of left-wing opinions on foreign and domestic policy, cultural and educational questions, almost all of it shared at the time and since by many members of the Labour Party and the Trade Union movement, can he please be more specific about the things with which he disagreed? Would Mr Ainsworth describe himself as having been a 'right-wing' member of the Labour Party at this time?

8. Was there no part of the IMG's position with which he then agreed?

9. Has he complained about the newspaper stories on his links with the IMG, in any way?

10. Will he seek to alter the entry in Wikipedia which says: "During 1982 and 1983, he was a candidate member of the International Marxist Group, but he was never a full member of that organisation." What would he substitute for these words?

11. Can he supply the name of the colleague who introduced him to the IMG?"

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18 July 2009 8:06 PM

Are we going to do the same thing to the unwanted old that we do to unwanted babies? That is to say, are we going to kill lots of them off, and pretend that this is just fine?

I think so. The only question is how we will do it, and what we will call it.

Aborted babies are slaughtered by the tens of thousands, solely because they are inconvenient to young, busy people.

Old, ill parents are also going to become a major nuisance to the same generation, very soon indeed. Baby boomers are all secretly terrified that mum or dad will end up wasting away slowly in a care home, rapidly consuming the inheritance.

Could this be why the argument for legalising ‘assisted suicide’ is becoming so strident? We are offered lots of weepy hard cases, where terribly ill people are desperate to die and their relatives insist they should be able to help them without any risk of prosecution.

But the simple question remains. If the people involved are genuinely moved by compassion, what do they have to fear from an investigation and a fair trial? They will be acquitted, even if they are charged.

Only those whose motives are suspect are at any risk.

This is why we are asked to admire the rather creepy suicide pact of Sir Edward and Lady Downes (above), as if it is some sort of act of heroism rather than a sad and squalid snuffing out of life in a Swiss back street.

These hard cases and emotional scenes are the equivalent of the old argument for abortion, that if you didn’t fully legalise it people would go to dangerous amateurs and die horribly. In fact, abortion in dire cases was legalised in 1938 after the famous trial of Dr Aleck Bourne, but that law didn’t offer a free pass to anyone who claimed vaguely that their mental health would be at risk if they carried the baby to term. It required serious evidence.

And as soon as it was replaced by a more liberal law, the present annual massacre began, and continued to grow. The same will happen to the old and unwanted. It will start with a few dozen annual trips to Zurich, urged on by ‘compassionate’ relatives and complaisant doctors. It will end with our hospitals switching on the morphine pump earlier and earlier.

Silence, the only way to salute these heroes

On Tuesday I stood by a road in Oxford and watched as eight coffins were driven past. There were hundreds of others there but, I’m glad to say, no applause. What would it be for? Brave death in combat, death of any kind, is a majestic thing. Applause is for a well-played shot in tennis or cricket, or a good line in a speech, not for death. Silence is the only proper way to acknowledge death.

The heart lurches, unexpectedly hard, at the sight of so much loss, and at the curious contrast between the heat and noise of Afghanistan and the cool summer evening in a green suburb. How they must often have longed to come home to our grey quiet skies, but not like this.

The crowd I saw were the heart of England. Quite a lot of younger people, many from Service families.

A stout contingent of former soldiers in their British Legion berets, who would have been there till midnight if they had to be. Big, quiet blokes in regimental ties. But people of my class and generation, the fiftysomething graduates who are thick on the ground in Oxford, were almost entirely absent, though the place was not hard to find, and it was well after the working day’s end. It’s the graduates who sent the soldiers there, of course.

But it’s generally the others who go. That’s why the stupid war goes on unquestioned, and why politicians, never in our history so ignorant of war, have allowed the debate about whether we should be there at all (we shouldn’t) to dribble away into an argument about helicopters.

Next time, they should lay the coffins on the despatch box in the Commons, right in the faces of the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet, and make all the MPs look at what they have done, while they debate their stupid war.

The Minister and the IRA fan club

I can recall members of the International Marxist Group yelling ‘Victory to the IRA!’ on student demonstrations. So I was interested to see stories that the latest Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, was a ‘candidate member’ (they didn’t let just anyone in) of the IMG in 1982 and 1983, when he was 30 years old, not a student.

I think the links between ‘New Labour’ and the revolutionary Marxist Left are extensive, interesting and important. So I asked a ‘spokesperson’ about it. She said: ‘He was never a member.’ Well, that looks like a denial, but isn’t. The story says he was a candidate for membership, not that he was a member.

The source said: ‘A friend who was in the organisation tried to persuade him to join.’ Apparently he went to ‘a couple’ of meetings? Only two, or more? No answer. The source wouldn’t say. The source said he just went because he was open-minded.

So would he have gone to a BNP meeting, being so open-minded? The source: ‘Certainly not.’ Then why go to a meeting of a group that supported the IRA? The spokesperson floundered. Eventually I was sent a written statement asserting that Mr Ainsworth’s brush with the IMG ‘reinforced his firm view that he did not agree with anything they had to say’. If he had such a firm view already, why go once, let alone twice?

When I asked several supplementary questions, the answer was silence. I shall publish the unanswered questions on my blog and continue to press for answers.

Words that will haunt Reid forever

‘Doctor’ John Reid, the ex-Communist former Defence Secretary, is cross about being mocked for saying our troops would leave Afghanistan without a shot being fired. He moans: ‘I never at any stage expressed the hope, expectation, promise or pledge that we would leave Afghanistan without firing a shot.’

Really?

Channel 4 News has unearthed his original words, spoken in Kabul on April 23, 2006: ‘We’re in the south to help and protect the Afghan people to reconstruct their economy and democracy. We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years’ time without firing one shot.’ Time’s up. And, given how many people have died, I think ‘Doctor’ Reid has little to complain about.

***********************Residents of Hove have been astonished to find Police Community Support Officers climbing into their homes through open windows. The PCSOs then delivered lectures on security. What’s wrong with this? It is yet another example of the liberal elite state’s defeatist view of crime. They think people do bad things because they are poor, not because they are bad. So they aren’t prepared to patrol the streets, or punish thieves. Instead they go round like Wee Willie Winkie, barking at the innocent, urging them to hide in the summer heat behind triple-locked doors and sealed windows. Sack them all, and start again.

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16 July 2009 12:52 PM

Weary as I am of the drugs issue, because of the frustrated fury it engenders in me to see intelligent people arguing for the wanton destruction of themselves, of other people's children and ultimately of civilisation, I feel compelled to continue discussing it because it routinely attracts more correspondence than almost any other subject. At the time of writing, my Tuesday posting on drugs has attracted 51 comments, compared with 17 on civil partnerships and 12 on Russia.

It is both a very small subject and a very large one. It is small in that, to anyone with a moral sense, the act of deliberately destroying and disrupting your perception of the material world is self-evidently wrong; so is deliberately damaging your own body. Even for those who lack the moral foundation to deduce these points from the known and understood truths of life, and who witlessly maintain that each man is an island entire of himself, it is clearly spiteful and ungrateful to your parents to pay them back for many years of love and nurture by doing such dangerous self-mutilating things to yourself. I suspect that only the deliberately childless are unaware of the nature and extent of the wrongdoing involved here.

It is also small in that it is likewise obvious to the feeblest mind that wicked deeds are less common when they are rigorously detected and harshly punished than when they are slyly encouraged, officially excused and unpunished. I note that the druggie advocates continue to pretend that there is a 'war on drugs' despite the evidence in Kathy Gyngell's posting (which I quoted at length) that drug possession of itself is no longer pursued or punished by our criminal justice system. But since they can get away with this sort of dishonest rubbish so easily, why bother actually taking it on board?

It is a large subject, in that those who are unable (because unwilling) to grasp the propositions above are the victims of an enormous revolution against reason and morality, under way now since the French Revolution, in which selfishness and immorality are dignified with such terms as 'libertarian' or 'freethinker', and advocates of the destruction of civilisation pose, without any sense of embarrassment, as its friends. This is the real battle for the soul of mankind, now coming to its conclusion as the forces of the unrestrained market align themselves with the forces of immorality and the forces of authoritarian despotism, in the most appalling alliance since the Hitler-Stalin pact.

So let me set out the limited terms on which we might debate this to a conclusion, for once.

The ground I choose is the suggestion that those who wish to see the laws against the possession of illegal drugs enforced are hypocritical, because of their allegedly relaxed attitude to the legal poisons, alcohol and tobacco.

First, and devastating to this argument is the fact that I have no such relaxed attitude, though my critics pretend that I have for the sake of their argument. They should stop doing so. To ensure that they do, and to help their understanding, I summarise my position here:

I think the law should be used to control the use of alcohol and of tobacco. In the case of smoking, this is very easy for me. I do not smoke. I do not like others smoking nearby, especially when I am eating or in an enclosed space. I think smoking by anyone of my generation or those younger than me is close to an insane act, given what we have now known for many years about its likely effects on the human body. I have been impressed by the effectiveness of smoking bans in offices and other public places, bans which I once opposed and now support, and think that such action has helped many people give up their habit, even though I think the 'science' on 'second-hand smoke' is highly suspect. I have begun to think it possible that smoking might be eradicated by legal force in a couple of generations.

I do not think alcohol can be so easily dealt with. This is partly because it is far deeper in our culture than tobacco, which we managed quite happily without until 500 years ago. It is partly because large numbers of people are quite capable of drinking alcohol for pleasure alone, without becoming drunk, violent, incapable or incoherent, and many drink it in small entirely non-intoxicating quantities, especially in the case of wine, because they like the taste. It would be very difficult, in fact impossible, to frame legislation that left these people free to drink while preventing those who drank to get drunk. (There's no such distinction among dope-smokers, all of whom smoke to become stupefied, and the same of course goes for cocaine and heroin users.) I think strict licensing laws and targeted taxation, as existed in this country until very recently, are the most effective method of controlling alcohol consumption in Britain. Even so, I have said before, and here repeat, that I would give up the small amount of alcohol I drink, tomorrow and forever, if I believed that by doing so I would aid the battle against drunkenness.

I don't think this would happen, though I remain open to argument and persuasion. As we are tirelessly informed by the pro-dope campaigners, who do occasionally deal in facts on the rare occasions when it suits them to do so, attempts to ban alcohol abruptly by law in countries where drinking is established have repeatedly failed. Any visitor to alcohol-free Islamic Iran is quickly offered illicit booze, and I know personally of people who have successfully availed themselves of this offer, and got away with it. I believe that Iranian law outlaws possession, as well as manufacturing, transport and sale.

The US Volstead Act, under which Alcohol Prohibition was introduced there, significantly did not ban possession, as any serious prohibitive law should. Had it done so, I think it would have proved even more unenforceable than it turned out to be, since many middle class wine drinkers, members of the professions, respectable Italian and German family men, etc, would have been prosecuted for doing something they had been brought up to regard as normal.

I would challenge any of my drug-apologist critics to make an equivalent statement, that they would give up their cannabis, heroin, cocaine or other poisons tomorrow, if they thought it would help save anyone from the many disasters associated with these substances. I can guarantee that none of them actually thinks this, since none of them believes it. Their whole case is to argue for the general legalisation of illegal substances which they enjoy using, so as to remove the very small risk that they may be prosecuted and punished, and presumably lower the price as well. But how can we trust their statements, since I believe many of them brazenly lie about their own use of illegal drugs, so as to conceal their self-interested motivation in this argument?

Further, I would say that many if not most of these drug apologists are themselves users of alcohol and tobacco, probably excessive ones, and have no genuine disapproval of them. And I would repeat the simple point they never deal with, that making something legal and accepted illegal is wholly different from properly enforcing an existing law on something which has long been illegal, which most people don't use, and which is not part of our culture. To take a point half way between alcohol and cannabis, the case of tobacco, I can foresee a point, many years from now, when it might be productive to outlaw the sale and possession of tobacco. To do so now would be to destroy the progress we have made in discouraging its use. Tobacco and alcohol use are both far more widespread and accepted than cannabis has ever been.

I would insert here the account of the story of Patrick Cockburn and his son Henry, which I reproduce here. Patrick Cockburn himself (who I think I could fairly say is a man of the Left) wrote it. I understand from many conversations with parents of children of this age that similar stories are by no means uncommon even among the stable, educated, enlightened middle class:

"On February 10, 2002, I called my wife Jan by satellite phone from Kabul, where I'd been writing about the fall of the Taliban. Her voice sounded more anxious than I'd ever heard before and I felt a sense of dread.

She said our 20-year-old son Henry, a student at art college in Brighton, was in a mental hospital. He'd tried to swim Newhaven estuary fully clothed the previous evening and had been found by fishermen as he left the near-freezing water.

They feared he had hypothermia and took him to A&E.

The doctors, suspecting that he might have been trying to commit suicide, called the police, who ran Henry's name through their computer. They found they had arrested him for a few hours ten days earlier.

Passers-by had seen Henry, barefoot and dishevelled, climbing the dangerously high wall of a railway viaduct and reported him as a potential suicide.

He denied to the police that he was trying to kill himself, claiming he'd climbed the viaduct only to get a better view of Brighton.

Taking into account this earlier incident, the police decided Henry was a danger to himself and should be sent to a mental hospital. The NHS one was full, so he was sent to The Priory in nearby Hove as 'overflow'.

I told Jan I would come home. I couldn't get a flight from Kabul, so I decided to drive to Islamabad in Pakistan and get a plane from there.

My driver Mohammed gulped at the thought of going through the Kabul Gorge to the Pakistan border, because the Taliban were attacking travellers.

I told him my eldest son was very ill and he agreed we would have to go. I managed to get the first plane from Islamabad to Heathrow, and arrived in Brighton the next day.

Henry was pleased to see me. He was in a neat room on the third floor of the clinic. A nurse checked on him every 20 minutes.

He was baffled and subdued by what had happened. He downplayed the idea that he had intended to commit suicide, and said he had felt the urge to walk barefoot back to his old home in Canterbury, 70 miles away. Newhaven estuary had simply been an obstacle to be crossed.

He felt being held in The Priory was a form of persecution or at best a misunderstanding: the police and doctors were over-reacting to his eccentric lifestyle.

Henry has always had great intelligence, wit and charm. From an early age, he showed an intense interest in other people and made friends easily.

He later told me he felt 'shy and inhibited' as a teenager at King's School in Canterbury, but I do not think this was true.

He was artistic and had won at least one valuable prize for his painting. He had no difficulty in getting the A-levels to enter Brighton art college at the end of 2001.

I had been proud of Henry's ability to get on well with my friends, mostly foreign correspondents, though they were much older than he was.

But I also worried that he was something of a Peter Pan, a boy whose magical charm made it difficult for him to grow up.

I sat on the bed in Henry's room in The Priory and he lay on the floor. Sometimes he beat out a rhythm on an upturned waste-paper bin and chanted snatches of rap, but mostly he was listless and remote. He had grudgingly told the doctors he had been seeing visions and hearing voices since that January.

'I tried to climb the bank by the railway station because I thought the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were on the other side,' Henry told me years later. 'It sounds dotty, but I felt there was another world beyond the tracks.

'Trees were talking to me like someone speaking in my head. Earlier, I had asked an old woman with a dog the way to a coffee shop. She giggled and pointed the wrong way, and I truly thought she was a witch.'

Jan and I soon became familiar with the distorted landscape of the strange world in which Henry was living. The visions and voices, though the most dramatic part, were infrequent.

He spoke vaguely of religious and mystical forces and became ascetic, adopting a vegan diet and not wearing shoes or underpants. He was wary of anything mechanical or electronic, such as watches, mobile phones and smoke alarms.

The consultant diagnosed Henry as being in the preliminary phase of schizophrenia. I knew almost nothing about the illness, except that it did not mean having a split personality.

I had spent months in hospitals in Cork and London when I had polio in an epidemic in 1956, but had never been inside a mental hospital. I knew schizophrenia was serious, but I hadn't realised how devastating it was. I read up about it with increasing dismay.

The average age for the onset of schizophrenia is 18 in men and 25 in women. There are 250,000 diagnosed cases in Britain, though the true number might be closer to half a million.

Symptoms do not necessarily include violence, though the suicide rate is high. The illness can be alleviated and controlled, but not cured, by drugs developed since the Fifties. Medication may work, but it is not clear why.

The causes of schizophrenia have long been the subject of prolonged, rancorous and inconclusive debate among scientists.

People develop the illness because they are genetically predisposed to do so. But it is not genes alone that are responsible.

Tests show that if one of a set of identical twins develops schizophrenia, the other has a 50 per cent chance of suffering as well. So events in the person's life may play a part.

The onset of the disease may be brought on by the loss of a job, academic failure, the breakdown of a love affair or the death.

Or it might, though this is unproven, be the result of taking mind-altering drugs such as cannabis or skunk.

I blame cannabis for what happened to Henry. He says he smoked a lot between the ages of 14 and 19, but I didn't notice at the time.

I would have been concerned, of course, if I'd known back then, but until recently I had no idea about the explosive impact cannabis can have on some people.

I don't think people realise 19 out of 20 people might take a small quantity of cannabis without ill effects, but for the 20th person who has a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, the result is catastrophic.

I don't believe those who advocate less stringent laws on the sale and consumption of cannabis realise the devastating effect it can have.

I started talking to friends about mental illness only after Henry was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and I was astonished to discover how many had close relatives who were mentally ill.

It is as if ailments of the mind, and schizophrenia in particular, are feared more than any physical illness, aside from Aids.

The Priory doctors explained that 'a third of people diagnosed with schizophrenia recover completely, one-third have further attacks but show improvement, and one-third do not get better'.

In reality, the statistics are more complicated and less comforting. We did everything to help Henry. Along with Jan and his younger brother Alex, I visited him often.

I took a room in Brighton and walked around the town with Henry most days until he was released nine weeks later. He then came home to Canterbury.

The medication had done him good, but he saw taking the anti-psychotic drugs twice a day as an imposition and secretly began to spit them out.

My son, who had been so alert, original and inquiring, sank into gloomy passivity. At the end of the summer, he went back to art college, on the advice of a local consultant, but could not cope.

He returned to Canterbury, and by 2003 had been sectioned in the first of a succession of hospitals and halfway houses we were to get to know all too well over the next five years.

It is not that Henry became a wholly changed personality. Most of the time it was possible to have normal conversations, and he remained affectionate, witty and intelligent.

But he would sometimes disappear into the countryside, running through brushwood and streams until he was found, often naked, dirty and covered with scratches.

The grim aftermath of one of these disappearances comes across in Jan's diary entry for February 4, 2004, when we saw him in hospital.

'They show us into his room where he's on the bed, looking terrible,' she wrote. 'He's scratched all over - especially on his feet, his face, too - the scratches red and sore. He looks at us with such apparent terror that I wonder if he's hallucinating.

'We sit down with him, Patrick with his arm around Henry's shoulders, I at his feet. I touch these gently and he shudders. He weeps and grimaces silently for about ten minutes, then gradually calms down.'

I was always frightened that one day Henry, so often soaked to the skin and without food, would not return from his wanderings. But though he did dangerous things easily, he retained a survival instinct. When freezing or starving, he would seek help.

At least he has survived, which is not true of so many schizophrenics.

And in the past 18 months, in a clinic in East London, he seems, slowly and painfully, to be getting better."

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14 July 2009 8:03 AM

Last week this blog was pestered by various people trying to make out that Portugal has done something interesting and exciting about drugs. There is a gap of understanding between me and such people. How can they not be disgusted by self-stupefaction? How can they imagine that coddling and indulging drug-taking will have any other effect than making it more common? Do they think that drug-takers will cease to be a menace to themselves and others just because they obtain their poisons legally? Has the legalisation of that other vice of weakness, gambling, made it less common or driven criminals out of the business? Why is it so hard for them to grasp that, where self-restraint fails to stem evil, the law must punish and achieve with fear what ought to have been achieved with wisdom?

Drugs, the ultimate self-indulgence, are (like sexual omnivorousness and scorn for marriage) one of the totems of the selfish generation which smashed up Protestant Britain in the 1960s. If my opponents would simply say, ’We don't care about you, our parents, our society, our future, our culture, we just care about our own pleasure and the rest of you can get knotted’ (which is in fact what they think), then at least we'd know where we stood and could treat them with the contempt they so richly deserve.

But of course they sidle away from admitting that they might have any personal motive for wanting easy access to these poisons (which they cannot have without making it easier for everyone else too). They have the nerve to pose as 'libertarians'. I cannot accuse individuals of this without proof, even though it is a vital part of my argument that drug legalisers have a selfish motivation, and indeed that this is almost without exception the main reason for their holding the opinions they do. Hence this general point is made here, without any suggestion that any pro-drug person posting here is in fact a user of illegal narcotics.

And they try to dress their greasy selfishness up as a laudable and rational campaign. I say, to hell with them, as long as they work so blithely for the cause of evil. I've grown weary trying to counter their pretence to be concerned about alcohol and tobacco (they couldn't care less, as can easily be established, but have picked up this tricksy argument in some PSHE class and have succeeded in using it to baffle a few of their thicker opponents, so carry on using it as if it were a magic death-ray), their red-herring rubbish about ‘medicinal marijuana’, their baseless claims that people cannot stop taking drugs if they want to because of some mysterious force called 'addiction', which just happens to be objectively unproveable.

But just in case any of them are genuinely interested in argument, which in my experience they aren't, I here reproduce a recent posting by Kathy Gyngell, author of the well-titled pamphlet ‘The Phoney War on Drugs’, which Kathy has posted at the Centre for Policy Studies site, which dismantles the Portuguese ploy pretty thoroughly. By comparison with me, Kathy is a 'moderate' (she believes, bafflingly, in the fantasy of 'addiction') but I think the facts speak fairly powerfully:

“Earlier this year The Economist argued for legalisation of drugs as the ‘least bad solution’, positing that not only would it drive away the crime lords (though also engaged in people trafficking, prostitution, money laundering and black markets in tobacco and alcohol, inter alia) but would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public health problem.

In this utopia governments would tax and regulate the drug trade (hopefully preventing young people and schoolchildren from being targeted by the rump of the illicit trade) save billions on law enforcement (never minding the costs of enforcing the regulations and expanding health care costs) and use the funds raised and the billions hoped to be saved on enforcement to educate the public on the risk of drugs. Money left over would be there to indefinitely treat the many for whom 'education' about risk had been to no avail.

“This panacea is supported by several drug reform agencies, libertarian organisations and by those who have little understanding of the role that social conditions and cultural values play in the etiology of addiction.”

So recent publicity about changes to Portuguese drug laws, implemented seven years ago now, was leapt on last week by those enthusing for such a change. It led several otherwise well informed and intelligent people I know (and without doubt several that I don't) to believe that Portugal has followed the Economist's advice and it is working. But this is not the case at all.

Portugal's 'experiment', actually only an amendment to their drugs laws regarding personal possession, has been over egged. Mark Easton in his recent BBC blog (though making it clear that Portugal had not legalised drugs) made the tendentious assertion that the heroin user in Portugal, 'unlike in any other country in the world', can be confident that his drug use will not land him in prison. He went on to indicate that health and social workers there are uniquely free from fear of the law to dispense the paraphernalia of heroin use in the name of public health.

But neither of these 'freedoms' is new or different in kind to those in Britain, several other European countries or even America. In the UK it has been legal for doctors, drug treatment workers and pharmacists to supply certain types of equipment, such as cleaning items, to drug users with the aim of preventing disease and infection, since 2003.

Needle exchange has been available for very, very much longer. The same is true of the Netherlands. Whether this has had the desired effect of improving public and personal health, here or elsewhere, remains a moot point. In the UK blood borne viruses and drugs deaths are unabated and rising. As each harm reduction measure fails to impact, ever more are demanded by their exponents.

In Portugal, as in every country signed up to the UN treaties, possessing, dealing and trafficking drugs remain illegal. All that changed under Portugal's 2001 amendment was that any one caught with not more than ten daily doses (defined for each drug by weight) would not be jailed or arrested as such. So just as in the UK, the drug user can be taken to a police station and ordered to attend a hearing at one of 18 regional 'dissuasion' commissions.

These commissions can compulsorily (as can the courts in the UK) send an offender for treatment or let him off with a warning. That general drug use has not apparently risen in Portugal (nor in the UK according to limited British Crime Statistics) since this amendment tells us absolutely nothing. What we need to know is whether tolerance of and support for drug use had led, is leading or will lead to more and to longer addiction. In the UK the evidence of rising 'problem drug use' suggests it is.

This Portuguese 'experiment' mirrors the practice of British drugs policy but in one thing. The British police and the British courts have been directed by government to reduce acquisitive crime believed to be drug provoked. As a result it is drug-using shop lifters who are targeted by the courts for treatment, not addicts per se.

In both Portugal and the UK use is not an offence on its own; possession is the offence. Cautions (just under 35,000 of them here per annum) followed by fines, but not jail, are the UK's 'enforcement' response of choice to possession of hard and soft drugs alike. Possession rarely ends in a custodial sentence - only a thousand or so of these were handed out in the last recorded year - for all drugs, hard and soft. The next likely outcome, after warnings and fines, is a community treatment order (7,000 in the last recorded year).

So considering we have some 325,000 addicts in the UK any intimation that the official response to drug addiction is punitive or that this is the root of the problem would be to traduce the facts. The popular belief that our prisons are filled with inmates whose only crime is to use an illegal drug is a myth.

Even in America, where, according to their Bureau of Justice Records, few are in prison for possession alone - little more than 2 per cent - virtually no one is in prison for possession per se if they do not have a previous record.

The assumption that punitive jail sentences for addiction, which do not anyway exist in the UK, are the root of the problem would only anyway make sense if it was prohibition that established the connection between addiction and crime in the first place. But the history of drug use reveals a more complicated story than this - the connection between criminal activity and addictive drug use predates legislative prohibitions.

But whatever the historical debate the inappropriate use of punishment for addiction is today far less of an issue than the misunderstandings that persistently surround the impulse to cure it. It is the institutionally-entrenched misconception that addiction is a chronically relapsing disease (needing life long treatment) and the associated view that offenders are invariably victims of their disease that stand in the way of dealing with the drug problem.

The evidence from America that addiction is the psychiatric disorder with the highest rate of recovery should come as no surprise. Every good drugs therapist knows that addicts stop using drugs when the costs of continuing become too high. Unfortunately this government has been busy ensuring that they never do.

Makes you think, doesn't it? Or rather, it would make anyone think who didn't have a vested interest in legalising his poison of choice, and would rather see thousands of other lives ruined than sacrifice half an ounce of his own pleasure.

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There used to be things we never had to think about. It never crossed anyone's mind that marriage could be either wanted or accomplished by anyone except a man and a woman, and it isn't very long since divorce was very rare indeed, and everyone assumed that marriage was for life. The phrase ‘till death us do part’, at the heart of the Church of England marriage service, was the title of a long-running situation comedy, and nobody thought it odd or unfamiliar, as I think they would now. It was what most people had said at their own weddings.

I am always advising people to read the Church of England's 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which the Church's liberal establishment longs to be rid of but cannot quite stamp out. It is still fairly easy to find at the backs of churches, and certainly in any decent library or properly-stocked bookshop. As well as being a major work of poetry and devotional literature, and the last place where you can still find Miles Coverdale's haunting translation of the Psalms, it is crammed with interest and history. But ‘The form of solemnization of Matrimony’, the Anglican marriage service, is also a carefully-constructed contract, an explanation of the purpose of marriage and a guide to how it is to be done. The Church is of course trying its best to stop people using this service now, offering instead various bland and denatured rituals and hoping that couples won't be aware of the tougher, more serious and much more beautiful version in the Prayer Book.

And it has simultaneously retreated, shamefully, from its own insistence that marriage is for life by becoming increasingly sloppy about the remarriage of divorced persons in church, and even about the marital status of its own clergy. De facto, if not de jure, the C of E now believes that marriage isn't for life. Even so, the 1662 service remains the lawful standard against which all other wedding ceremonies can (and in my view should) be measured.

It requires, interestingly, that one particular prayer (for fruitfulness and for the Christian and virtuous upbringing of the children) be tactfully omitted ‘when the woman is past childbearing’. Which brings me to the question of how it can be all right for a man and woman to marry when they have no intention of having children, and are possibly incapable of it, while it is wrong for a man to marry a man and a woman to marry a woman.

Well, here you run up against a number of problems. The answer seems to me to be blindingly obvious, and not to need any explanation to the conscious, intelligent person. Marriage, for most of us, is defined as a union between two people of opposite sex. A lifelong union of two people of the same sex, whether you approve of such a thing or not, is by definition not marriage. Children would of course be a likely result of a marriage, and are one of its main purposes. But they are not a necessary condition of it, as many childless married couples can testify. So that does not mean that the union of two opposites is the same as the union of two who are not opposite.

For those of us who grew up before the cultural revolution, it just is so that marriage is between a man and a woman. How could two men, or two women, be married? Until very recently, you might as well have asked ‘Why can't bumble-bees do algebra?’ Or ‘Why can't buses jump over rivers?’ Answers such as ‘Because they just can't’ or 'That's not what buses are for’ or indeed ‘Why would they want to?’ occur, along with a feeling that the questioner is perhaps having a laugh at our expense. But these days it is not so simple. The questioner isn't being funny, or at least I hope not, though I think he hopes to catch us out in some way, and regards himself as very clever for having produced this question (which I might say I have been asked about 400 times since I first took on the weary duty of defending Christian sexual morality against its critics, since the Church itself seemed to have pretty much given up trying. Is it in some book of questions issued to the sexual revolution lobby?).

Only in this unhinged age is it necessary to go, almost all the time, not just to first principles, but beneath even them, which demonstrates just how deeply revolutionary the cultural and sexual revolution is. It questions, and intends to loosen, the foundations of the pillars of civilisation. Let us hope it has a good replacement handy, for when those pillars finally fall.

But if I am compelled to put the blindingly obvious into mere words, this is how I would do it. A man and a woman marrying when they are past childbearing are honouring marriage and (perhaps in the case of two widowed people seeking companionship in later life) are hoping to emulate as much as possible of this complex relationship between the two very different sexes, in which each surrenders an important part of life in return for gaining something much greater. In the days when such things mattered, I imagine that many such couples did so also as their tribute to 'respectability'. They didn't want anyone to misunderstand the nature of their household, or to believe that they were defying a convention which they in fact respected. For the same reason many such people no longer get married at all.

The church's view that man and wife are 'one flesh' is not merely a metaphor for the children that they may produce. It is a statement that a man and a woman united in this way are greater than the sum of their parts, partly because they are so different from each other and have so much to learn from each other. The differences between the two sexes - the fact that each necessarily possesses characteristics the other necessarily lacks - are crucial to this formula. A man living with another man for their whole lives may learn all kinds of things. But he will not, I think, learn what a man married to a woman learns. Mind you, homosexual civil partnerships are not contracted for life, any more than heterosexual civil marriages are, since both can be lawfully dissolved, and I think this makes them very different things from lifelong religious marriages. There's an argument for saying that heterosexual civil marriage has more in common with homosexual civil partnership than it does with lifelong Christian marriage.

A man who seeks to marry a man (or a woman who seeks to marry a woman) is also in my view making a conscious or unconscious (and in most cases conscious) propaganda gesture against the existing idea of marriage. Such a relationship cannot produce a child of both parents at any age. It has to be primarily sexual in purpose. In fact (as we have discussed) brothers and sisters living together, or persons not in sexual relationships, do not qualify for Civil Partnerships and presumably wouldn't qualify for homosexual marriage either, if that comes about. The 'prohibited degrees of relationships' for Civil Partners in Schedule 1, Part 1 of the Civil Partnership Act 2004 seem to me to be a recognition that these are expected by law to be sexual partnerships.

I don't myself doubt that this is a major reason for the liberationist campaign for single-sex marriage - propaganda of the deed. I've often pointed out that the supposed benefits of civil partnerships, in terms of the treatment of 'next of kin' could easily have been achieved by other, less revolutionary legislation. The real point of the change was to emphasise that this is now a post-Christian society, a fact that is becoming more evident almost every day. The numbers of Civil Partnerships are actually quite small, after an initial rush, and several such partnerships have already been dissolved. I suspect that such partnerships will become less and less common as time goes by, and their propaganda effect weakens. The virtual abolition of inheritance tax for all but the very rich (who don't pay it anyway, thanks to good lawyers) has also removed one of the main incentives. I suppose we shall soon also move on to 'pre-nuptial' agreements between Civil Partners, now that English law has surrendered to pressure to allow this presumption of failure at the start of every marriage.

It's interesting, and it goes very deep. But ultimately we must recognise that a revolution is under way and that this is part of it, and that we must decide whether we support or oppose this. Revolutions will not allow you to be neutral about them for long, as they reach so deep into your private life.

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I'm pleased to see so many clued-up correspondents pointing out the reason for the Dutch anomaly, 'what about the Dutch' being the invariable response of the sex-ed fanatics to criticism. I'm told that an almost identical programme in more 'liberal' Denmark is associated with very different results. In Britain, where we combine subsidies for fatherless families with state sponsored demoralisation, we get what we get. I certainly don't think there's any evidence that sex education has reduced this effect. No doubt easy availability of the Pill etc influences behaviour, but the same people who demand sex-ed (see my 'Abolition of Britain') sought ready availability of contraceptives to the unmarried. And got it. The history of the Victoria Gillick challenge to this, her brief victory and the eventual reversal of that victory in the courts, is worth studying.

I have tried to access the research by Kirby, Rolleri and Laris which has been commended to me, but have so far found only rather crude powerpoint stuff which leaves me unimpressed and without much information.

My thoughts about Russia produce some bizarre responses. The person who thinks that my views mean I must approve of the Tiananmen Square massacre will have to explain his logic to me. I don't follow. What I approve of about Russia is its insistence on being allowed to continue as a sovereign country, rather than as a subject of some supranational authority. I also find the 'colour revolutions' in Ukraine and Georgia highly suspect, and am nauseated by the uncritical acceptance by many of my media colleagues that these mobs of teens in t-shirts were somehow the harbingers of liberty. Who paid for the t-shirts, for a start?

This did not (note the qualifying phrase 'for all its undoubted faults') imply a general approval of everything the Russian State does. I am likewise baffled by ‘Arlington Brough’ (surely not a real name, naming himself after a cemetery and a motorbike?) who argues that these sentiments make me a 'raging left-winger'? Why? What does he mean? Is he in fact thinking at all, or has he not noticed how the world has changed? Left-wingers are in favour of supranational power, dislike national sovereignty and generally supported the 'Colour Revolutions'. Russia is no longer a Communist country, and there is nothing left-wing about it that I can see.

In reply to Mr ‘Demetriou’, why is the tale of the scarecrow a 'non-story'? A lot of newspapers, from the Daily Mail to the Independent, thought it worth carrying, which suggests Mr ‘Demetriou’ does not have specially good news judgement. Don't events like this explain in a few paragraphs what might otherwise take thousands of words to show? The attitude of the middle class to the police (crucial for their operation and survival) has utterly altered in the last 20 years thanks to this sort of attitude. I might also mention the advice offered to respectable people as to how to behave if under police investigation, by the ex-blogger and copper 'Nightjack' a few weeks ago, which I found quite fascinating. This extraordinary social drama cannot be given too much coverage.

If he wants to 'hear more from me about the police', would 80,000 words do? I have written a book on the subject, called ‘A Brief History of Crime’, which was more reviled than anything else I have ever written, but which is packed with research on the police revolution with which other writers (who generally refuse to read my books because I am such a bad person) are now just catching up, five years later. I commend it to him. As with all my books, it can be obtained through any decent library. I don't, despite the carping of some people here, write books to make money, which is a good thing because they don't, but to spread ideas.

Mr ‘Demetriou’ also has some thoughts about Russia. Once again, he mistakenly assumes that I approve of everything that Russia does, even though he correctly quotes me as not doing so.

The USA, since the end of the Cold War, has pursued a foolish, pointless and unsustainable policy of moving into Russia's neighbours - Uzbekistan, Georgia, Ukraine, the Baltics. And it has rubbed Russia's nose in its defeat in the Cold War, extending NATO (which is now an alliance against what, exactly?) right up to Russia's borders when it had promised not to do so. Russia, on its side, had pulled peacefully out of the countries it had held by force, and had fought hard to hold on to as late as 1968, and had allowed Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics (plus the Caucasus states and its Asian Empire) to become independent. It had not undergone such a national humiliation since the Brest-Litovsk treaty of 1918, which proved temporary, as this arrangement also will. Rather than leave things alone, we used this temporary weakness, and our temporary strength, to humiliate and generally triumph over a prostrate Russia. It was by no means only the authoritarians and the KGB who were hurt and angered by this.

What was our aggression against Russia for? Post-Communist Moscow posed no global threat or challenge to the USA. It posed only a minor threat to central Europe, much less of one than it poses now thanks to our silly behaviour. Uzbekistan was hardly a democracy, though it provided a useful base, Georgia is a dubious state with scant respect for the rule of law, the Baltic Republics have always been a highly-sensitive area in which Russian will never lose interest (look at a map if you wonder why). It seems pretty clear to me that Georgia started last year's punch-up with Russia, and then lost. Ukraine's silly government has also quite deliberately rubbed Russia up the wrong way (encouraged, I suspect, by Western countries who ought to know better).

The effect of this, long prophesied by proper experts such as Sir Rodric Braithwaite (the best British ambassador to Moscow ever) was to encourage ultra-nationalist forces in Russia. It was this policy that led directly to the rule of Vladimir Putin, which I dislike as much as anybody for its internal repressions. Nor am I a newcomer to this opinion:

Here's what I wrote in the Mail on Sunday on 7th March 2004:

“Like a column of tanks in human form, Vladimir Putin slowly crushes the freedoms that flourished in Russia after the sudden collapse of the old Communist order - and nobody cares.

“The world, and the Russian people, are now witnessing the KGB putsch that everyone feared back in August 1991, when I watched as real tanks rolled, halted and then mysteriously turned back.

“But this time the coup d'etat is clever instead of clumsy; quiet instead of noisy, and its leaders icily sober rather than slurred, incoherent and drunk.

“And what is worse is that this assault on liberty is actually popular at home and willingly excused abroad. It seems to me to be part of a new death of freedom taking place around the world, where more and more exhausted, insecure and frightened people are sinking into the arms of authority with sighs of relief.

“Unless I am very much mistaken, the Russian people are about to vote for a tyrant who does not really think they have any right to choose him, and who despises democracy.

“They will do this because the word 'democracy' has been poisoned here. To most Russians it means crime, chaos, the wiping-out of their savings, the loss of their jobs and the humiliation of their nation. They have had enough of it.

“Perhaps that is why this election is being held more or less in secret. You would barely know it was happening if you had not been told. There is hardly a poster to be seen, though there are strange advertisements - including one on the backs of Tube tickets - urging people to vote. They do not say who to vote for, but they might as well.

“For Comrade Vladimir Putin is the only candidate, or more accurately the only candidate who counts. For the sake of form, a few others have been allowed to stand, but not run.

“They include a token Communist, Nikolai Kharitonov, so he can be beaten and Communism shown to be finished; a token nationalist, Sergei Glazyev, for the same reason; and a token Thatcherite liberal, Irina Khakhamada, ditto.

“The authorities would be devastated if these fig-leaf contenders withdrew, the only action within their power that could seriously upset the Kremlin. The veteran dissenter Yelena Bonner, widow of the majestic liberation fighter Andrei Sakharov, has actually called on them to do so.

“But when Ms Khakhamada said she would pull out if the others would, nobody took up the offer.

“Here is an example of the shameless rigging of this poll: the campaign began with a 30-minute televised meeting between Putin and his supporters shown on the big national channels, all government-controlled.

“But when the other candidates pleaded for equal time, the supposedly impartial election commissioner told them to get lost.

“The President meanwhile appears constantly on the prime- time TV bulletins, floating above the phony fray like an archangel on a cloud. He is portrayed sitting in an ornate, throne-like chair looking serious, rebuking ministers or meeting global notables.

“His challengers, if they appear at all, are shown doing stupid, trivial things such as playing billiards.

“A few heavyweight newspapers, with tiny circulations among the big city elite, discuss the poll and cover it properly. But there is no middle ground between them and trashy papers adorned with Russian nipples and packed with showbiz trivia, but which also find time to print large, damaging stories about Irina Khakhamada.

“Ms Khakhamada, a young and slender 48, is by far the most appealing of Putin's challengers. A former economics teacher, she is a successful businesswoman and mother with a real if tumultuous family life. Her Japanese father was an ardent Communist who came here to build paradise and died disappointed. She sees the best hope for the future in a prosperous, free middle class, still a tiny force in this country.

“When I met her in a Moscow Italian restaurant, she explained her purpose in standing, though she has few illusions that she can win: 'I hope to provide strong opposition and to show that Putin is building a regime rather than a democracy.

'The President has huge power, his will rules everything and he is personally responsible for everything that goes on,' she explains. She complains of the self-censorship of the media and of 'the suppression of independent centres that express the will of the ordinary people'.

“When I put to her that her cause is hopeless, she resorts to an optimism which seems completely unrealistic.

'The true democrat should carry on fighting,' she insists. In many ways, she is Putin's ideal opponent. Her Japanese ancestry and looks make her unacceptable to the racially prejudiced Russian masses. Her business background also repels many poor Russians who associate all commerce with sharp practice and corruption.

“Another of Moscow's rare democrats, MP Vladimir Ryzhkov, 38, is even more scathing about the new Russia's fake freedom. 'It's a pseudodemocracy,' he says. 'It's impossible to have real competition with Putin and his group. As for the mass media, it can either be free or influential. Not both. The influential media are not free. The free media are not influential.' In recent years all three major TV stations have fallen under direct or indirect state control. They suppress or play down bad news within Russia, just as the old Soviet TV did.

“One victim of this is Yevgeny Kiselyov, who was for a while as close as Russia could get to Jeremy Paxman; an irreverent and searching TV interviewer. Now not merely has he been taken off the air: his old TV station has been bought up by a state-controlled company and turned into a poodle channel.

“Kiselyov admits this is not a full return to the old Communist days. Those who wish to think and speak freely can do so, but are simply denied any major platform. Books are published without difficulty. It is the TV transmission towers that are controlled. Kiselyov is infuriated by the way foreign leaders fail to criticise Putin for his tightening grip on the airwaves.

“He recalls his one meeting with Putin, during the state takeover of his TV station. Putin began by being utterly charming, as he is to almost everyone, but switched to a cold, bullying manner the moment Kiselyov challenged him.

'He wagged his finger at me and asked, ‘Do you think I don't know anything about your hour-long conversation with your boss?’ ‘ But when Kiselyov asked Putin outright if he was saying his phone was tapped, the President changed the subject and ignored him. Kiselyov believes Putin's charm is entirely false, instilled into him during his KGB training - for the best way to recruit and handle an agent is of course to pretend to be his friend.

“Those grim initials KGB are never far away in any discussion of the new Russia. Recently details were published of an Eighties secret KGB plan to allow economic freedom but keep iron political control, more or less what Vladimir Putin now seeks to do.

“Putin's potent private office is infested with KGB veterans with mysterious gaps in their official biographies, the so-called 'Siloviki', or 'men of force'; hard, quiet men from Russia's dark heart. They still openly admire Yuri Andropov, the KGB boss who briefly ran the USSR before his early death.

“Putin himself recently declared that the 1991 collapse of the USSR had been 'a national tragedy on an enormous scale'. Yet outside the feverish, garish capitalist enclave of Moscow, the USSR more or less survives, merely waiting to be called back into being.

“I travelled 120 miles south-east to the city of Ryazan and was instantly transported back to the old Soviet way of life, with a few important changes.

“The town centre is still dominated by a statue of Lenin, but behind him is a brand new bank - the Zhivago Bank, of all things. And down the road, the churches of Ryazan's beautiful miniature Kremlin are being lovingly restored. A brash new newspaper tries to expose corruption.

“The new Russia has realised it can dispense with the rubbish of Communism; the nationalisation of ice-cream stands and the suppression of faith, criticism and independent thought. In truth, kept under control, these things are no threat to central power.

“Ryazan, a heavily military city whose factories once turned out components for Moscow's fleets of tanks, submarines and bombers, suffered badly from freedom. Amid dingy apartment blocks bundled, ill-looking people, aged before their time, still struggle through wildernesses of rubbish, wreckage and vast brown puddles. The new economy, dozens of unconvincing banks and people selling mobile phones to each other, is just topdressing here, failing to conceal the glum reality.

“When I conducted a miniature opinion poll on Ryazan's streets, Putin won it. Many will vote for him out of a sort of habit, some because they reckon that if they do not use their ballots the authorities will steal them anyway.

“Most are worried sick by poverty and deprivation, salaries of £50 a month, failing jobs, housing shortages. 'My son must wait for me to die to get a flat,' said one sad grandmother. A few believed Putin had helped them, including a pharmacist who had finally started getting her wages again after a long gap.

“But perhaps my most interesting encounter was with Lydia Kryuchkova, deputy editor of the conservative local paper, the Ryazan Bulletin.

“I say 'conservative' because she loathes pornography and swearing, crime and disorder, unpunctuality and low culture.

“But Lydia, with her classic Soviet face straight out of the Sixties, is an unashamed Communist, even though she now wears a crucifix round her neck. ‘We had so-called democracy,' she says. 'We never had real democracy. What's essential now is to get rid of crime, to bring back order.

“Only after that will we install democracy.' What she - and millions of others - want is the security of the predictable.

“If they cannot have the rule of law, and such a thing is terribly remote in this place, they would at least like to be sure that tomorrow will be much like today.

“Putin hopes that is exactly what he can achieve, as long as the oil price stays high. And we, who in truth care more about Russia's oil than about her democracy, will look the other way as yet another brief, failed experiment in freedom slowly flickers and fades. How long before we decide that our freedom, too, is an expensive nuisance?"

11 July 2009 6:11 PM

The nation is turning against the war in Afghanistan and it is right to do so.

But disquiet and puzzlement must now become openly-expressed anger, or we shall have to endure years of grief and hundreds of sad processions before anything is done.

Members of Parliament, struggling for a way to redeem themselves, now have the chance to do so by taking every possible opportunity to question this futile, ill-run and ultimately doomed operation.

So far, they have disgraced themselves by allowing it to carry on without any proper debate.

But they must act swiftly. At the current appalling rate of loss, every day wasted means at least one more soldier killed, and several more severely injured.

Many of these have died, and many more will die, because the useless Ministry of Defeat is so bad - and so slow - at buying the right equipment.

This carnage would be bearable only if it had a purpose. Courage and dedication are good in themselves but they ought not to be squandered on futile things by incompetent officials and politicians.

Yet, despite the various official pretexts, none of which stands up to a minute's examination, the operation has no real aim, apart from a pitiful desire to suck up to Washington DC.

Washington will reward us as it always does, with contempt.

In the past century, our supposed 'closest ally' has deliberately superseded us as the world's greatest naval power, strong-armed us into dismantling our Empire, pressured us to abandon our independence to the EU and brutally forced us to surrender to the terrorists of the IRA.

Why, then, should we provide cover for an American propaganda exercise in Afghanistan?

We would be better friends if we stood up for ourselves from time to time.

The Secretary of State for Defeat, a former shop steward called Bob Ainsworth, drones that we will need 'courage and patience' to see this operation through.

Why should we have any more patience with this stupid, discredited, warmongering Government?

As for courage, Mr Ainsworth may possess this virtue for all I know.

But, alas, at the age of 57 he has no way of proving this by volunteering to take part in the 'hard and dangerous' way forward of which he speaks.

This is a pity. I for one should enjoy watching the entire Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet doing a stint of mine-clearing in Helmand.

But there are other forms of valour and there is one way Mr Ainsworth could win an accolade for bravery.

He could admit the truth - that British troops should not be in Afghanistan, that he has no idea what they are doing there, that his department has let them down severely, and that they must all come home.

Now that would be courage.

So how can you tell the real ones from the dummies?

We know that scarecrows have no brains. What about members of the wooden-headed modern police 'service'?

How do we explain the officious removal of a scarecrow dressed in a joke-shop police outfit, and holding a plastic bottle looking vaguely like a speed gun, part of a scarecrow festival in Brancaster?

Norfolk Police took it away and said it was 'inappropriate', that all-purpose bureaucratic word which has filled the gap left since we abolished the concept of 'wrong'.

Eventually, they gave it back but without the 'speed gun'.

A police spokesmoron said: 'An officer removed the scarecrow as it portrayed an incorrect and inappropriate message.

'Speed radars are used to prevent casualties on our roads and to address the irresponsible actions of motorists. They should not be recreated by the roadside in jest.'

Why not close them all down and start again? Even a straw-stuffed dummy would probably be more effective than our absent, militarised PC robocops.

Sex lessons lead to sex. Well I never!

Now we know that sex education works. It makes people have more sex, just as you might have thought it would.

After all, the more sex education we have had in schools over the past 40 years, the more under-age sex, teen pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions we have had.

But at last we have proof of the connection, thanks to research intended to show the opposite.

Tears of laughter streamed down my face as I read the report of the 'Young People's Development Programme', which exposed several hundred teenagers to fashionable 'harm reduction' material on sex and drugs.

This pitiful, defeatist stuff assumes that the young will have under-age sex and take drugs.

It matily tries to persuade them to do so 'safely' - though you might as well hit yourself hard on the head with a lump hammer 'safely' as try to use cannabis 'safely'.

And the young get the message. In this experiment, the targeted group actually ended up having more illicit sex than a control group who were not given the extra sex education.

The researchers - of course - don't get it. They say it is 'unlikely' that their free condoms and drivelling leaflets made things worse.

Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? But if you struggle through the report itself, you will find some fascinating pointers.

They 'expected' a different result. Does this mean they hoped for one?

In fact, they actually say the outcome of the research was 'unexpected'. Try as they may to find excuses for this result, they cannot.

They also cannot cope with their own findings, insisting that 'the unexpected sexual-health outcomes are unlikely to be attributable to the sex education within the programme'. Oh, really? Why not?

Well, because this was a 'relatively small and variably delivered component' (I bet that wouldn't have mattered if the result had gone the way they 'expected' it to).

But also because of 'the lack of previous evidence for harms arising from sex education'.

Some of us believe there's plenty of such evidence. But at least they won't be able to use that excuse the next time the research blows up in their faces.

************************************************************How gratifying that Barack Obama mania was completely absent during his trip to Russia.

For all its undoubted faults, Russia still behaves like a proper country, independent, unwilling to tolerate hostile bases on its border or have its government overthrown by mobs of manipulated teenagers in coloured T-shirts.

The rest of us are mesmerised by globalist drivel, like the people in that creepy Coca-Cola advertisement warbling 'I'd like to teach the world to sing'.

************************************************************Last week it was the G8. Next week it’ll be the G3, or the G5, the G17, perhaps the G20.

Who needs these freebies, ringed by riot police and consisting mainly of grotesquely opulent dinners?

If there really were an economic crisis, wouldn’t these things be cancelled?